The BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen faced calls to quit tonight after he was criticised for breaching the broadcaster’s rules on accuracy and impartiality in two reports about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

An inquiry found that a reference to ‘Zionism’s innate instinct to push out the frontier’ in an article for the BBC’s website breached guidelines.

In addition, a suggestion that Israel was ‘in defiance of everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own’ was said to have been ‘imprecise’.

A separate radio broadcast by Bowen also led to a complaint and was criticised by the trust.

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The initial claims by Bowen were made in a website report entitled ‘How 1967 Defined the Middle East’. It sparked two complaints.

Bowen’s online article, published last year, put the present-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict in context by explaining the events of the 1967 Six Day War.

But the committee said he should have done more to make clear that there were other views on the matter.